Of course, I ought to care
for William's politics. I expect I've done him harm--I know I have.
What's wrong with me?"
But suddenly, in the very midst of her self-examination, the emotion and
excitement that she had felt of late in her long conversations with
Cliffe returned upon her, filling her at once with poignant memory and a
keen expectation to which she yielded herself as a wild sea-bird to the
rocking of the sea. They had started--those conversations--from her
attempt to penetrate the secret history of the man whose poems had
filled her with a thrilling sense of feelings and passions beyond her
ken--untrodden regions, full, no doubt, of shadow and of poison, but
infinitely alluring to one whose nature was best summed up in the two
words, curiosity and daring. She had not found it quite easy. Cliffe, as
we know, had resented the levity of her first attempt. But when she
renewed it, more seriously and sweetly, combining with it a number of
subtle flatteries, the flattery of her beauty and her position, of the
private interest she could not help showing in the man who was her
husband's public antagonist, and of an admiration for his poems which
was not so much mere praise as an actual covetous sharing in them, a
making their ideas and their music her own--Cliffe could not in the end
resist her.
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